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Would You Pay For YouTube Videos?
secmartin writes "A couple of weeks ago, Google's CEO mentioned to investors that they might start charging YouTube's users for viewing content: 'With respect to how it will get monetized, our first priority, as you pointed out, is on the advertising side. We do expect over time to see micro payments and other forms of subscription models coming as well. But our initial focus is on advertising. We will be announcing additional things in that area literally very, very soon.' With the recent Disney-Hulu deal, Google is under increasing pressure to generate more revenue and at the same time attract more premium content. That means we might see payment options coming even sooner than expected, with control over the pricing models being handed over to the studios providing that content, like the way Apple caved in over variable pricing on iTunes. This raises an important question: would you actually pay for premium content on YouTube and other sites, or will this draw viewers away to other video sites?"
No
The simple answer is no. I think people will go to pages were the video is prefaced with a short commercial before paying for Youtube. That's my humble opinion though.
is that no product is going to want to be placed next to a monkey urinating in his own mouth.
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while($x--)
{
print 'NO LOL!'
}
That content's already free, and much of its public.
The media companies already have other venues, namely their websites and the channels they own. And bittorrent covers the rest.
So, why pay, when its free?
Why not? If the price is right and the content is worth, I have no problems in paying for it, just like I don't have problems paying for a ticket to a movie theater or for a nice and shiny DVD.
As most things in life, it all depends on the value you get in return for your money.
How much of the revenue would be going to the people who produce the videos?
We all know that Youtube costs Google money, that much is certain. But what do you do when you've been offering a free service for this long and then say, "Ok guys, you're going to need to pay for some things." I don't think it'll work. There's too many people that are used to the service being free, and not only that, but there are many alternatives should this arise.
Whether I'd pay or not, charging for videos would kill the platform. Why? Because there's a (more than one, actually) free alternative. Why would someone pay money for getting exactly what they get other places? You might get a few people to pay, in general, though, it would mean that people move elsewhere.
No, "what about Windows and Linux" does not count. YouTube doesn't come with your PC, YouTube has nothing you can't get elsewhere (like, say, Windows Games before the advent of Wine, and even with it). There is no "YouTube only" content that is so important to people that they wouldn't move to another video hoster in the blink of an eye.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Starting your post in the subject line is irritating to many readers. Congratulations!
It goes on the list right after
paying for slashdot commentary on my posts.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Hey, it worked for Napster, right?
Right.
I can see a system of inexpensive youtube videos tied to google payment. At say $.05 for a 10 minute video I can easily imagine not worrying about it. The problem is that if they are greedy and it is say $1 for a 10 minute video this will kill the model. I can also see that working well for low distribution content. 10k people at say $.25 per yr x 500 shows is not a bad revenue stream.
The standards for a paysite are much higher than for a free site. That means customer service. I do agree that this isn't likely to happen and the result is going to be that content fragments to dozens of sites all indexed ironically enough by google.
And I'd say that includes file-sharing and network tv. Americans are pretty trained to their video stimulus, and they'll find it. They also, however, have been trained to expect it for free. The box is open, I don't see it closing now.
"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry.'" -Gary Larson
...not.
If the Youtube video would be the movie showing right now in cinema, in 720p @ 3-4mbps, then yes, I would pay up to $1-1.5 to see it.
Without any kind of commercials. Not once. Anytime I want (I would be allowed to view only one of the movies I bought at a time so it wouldn't be abused).
The reality is movies won't be available outside US anyway, because of all the deals movie studios make with local distributors and resellers so I couldn't care less.
I would certainly pay a moderate amount for a High-quality, big pipe site with a wide selection of videos. And I mean wide, none of that "its from this provider, so it's in this other service". Of course with no DRM, I want to see the films at my mom's where there is no broadband. I say "a moderate amount" is a flat rate of about twenty dollars a month, perhaps up to forty if you use really a lot of bandwidth.
In the other corner, rather more likely, seeing what's on offer today, we could have an anemic selection of videos, many of them old, most of them in less-than-optimal quality (meaning you can get them in better quality in bittorrent), with a time lag for new releases, lots of DRM, and lots of service hiccups too.
Well, I can wait.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
That idea only works if you take the accountant view to running a business. But accounts don't run businesses. Entrepeneurs do.
What would be the cost to google of NOT having youtube. Shareholders make lousy businessmen even worse then accountants. At least accountants care about the bottom line at the end of the year, not the next quarter.
Shell recently said it would no longer concetrate on alternative energy. Smart short term move. VERY short term. The world is changing and you never know when you need to be ready to diversify. When Shell invested in alternative energy it cost them money but it was considered to be worth it because IF alternative energies became more important it would stop Shell from becoming UN-important.
Google didn't buy youtube because it thought youtube made money, it bought it because it saw a future there and wanted to be part of it. What better way to search through online video then to be the one hosting it. You may not like youtube searching but compare it to googles image search. Why do you think the first is more reliable? IF youtube had remained a 3rd party or even worse, had become MULTIPLE small time third parties, might another search engine take over if it became more capable of vinding the vids people wanted?
Wether google is right in this logic, or has another reason remains to be seen. Maybe they saw a huge future in ads in front of the vids. That means they need to control the vids. No ads in front of vids they don't control. if the ad market comes back or video ads become better, they are to late if they have no way to get them connected.
So, yes, right now Youtube costs money, but that is called investment. It is what shareholders were supposed to be for.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
YouTube could much more easily make money by charging a small fee to UPLOAD video to YouTube. If they charged you $1 per video upload, they'd make a mint and most people would be happy to pay it.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Pay to view? Sorry. There isn't much quality content on youtube worth paying for.
Pay to post? That might work. People who pay could have more control over their content. They could keep it from being compressed to hell, do things like swap the youtube logo with their own, have embedded links in their content, etc... I bet there is money in that market. But I'll tell you one thing... there ain't a damn thing on youtube I'd pay for. Cover bands doing cheesy remixes, teenagers getting their 15-minutes, and videos of cute pandas eating bamboo aren't worth paying for.
Nada, nope, No, nein, niet, ne
Just because they have to make money, doesn't mean I have to pay.
If you want premium content, you need another brand. Youtube stands for "us", not them!
How would you feel if you pay per video and got Rick Rolled? Or accidentally watched a Chris Crocker video? This will never work for user-submitted videos. Only if they offer HD, full-episode shows that I want to watch on any PC I own with no DRM would I even consider looking at it.
I MIGHT take the option of making a micro payment to make the video ad-free for me. That way anybody can access videos. It's not easy to charge for a user-generated video across the board because that will likely diminish ability to share videos. For example, now I post videos to my blog, facebook page, email the link to many people, etc. To require my viewers to pay for what I think is neat or nifty is slightly absurd especially when they're doing the same thing with their video links.
Point me to the bittorrent client that I can embed into any webpage, click "play", and with little to no wait, watch a video. Make sure it can work with 95% of all browsers on the market without installing a plugin*.
If you think bittorrent competes with Youtube, you dont understand what Youtube does.
* flash is a plugin, but since you already have it installed, it doesn't count.
If I get rickrolled, will I get my money back?
How can I pay a small amount for a vid when there is no existing world-wide service to pay a small amount without it costing me a fortune?
1 dollar (iTune cost) for a vid? Like hell. That is way to much and already in that case the costs of the actual transaction makes up an insane part. Imagine if your shopping for a new coat cost 50 bucks to pay with your bank card.
That is the reason micro-payments have not caught on. It is not that people would mind paying a a nickle, it is that paying a nickle costs 25 cents.
Perhaps google should go in the banking business to break through this. The banks sure as hell aren't going to. In the netherlands we got the cheapest pay system (PIN) and that is being replaced in the future because .... well because a working reliable secure cheap system just ain't good enough. We got to get the unreliable, not working expensive system everyone else uses.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The majority of YouTube video is so worthless I couldn't imagine ever paying for it. Sure, those forwards you get from people are cute and/or amusing for about 5 seconds, but nothing I would ever want to pay for.
On the other hand, perhaps giving users the opportunity to make some money in the form of micro-payments could actually increase the quality of what is made available. In this case, it would definitely be worth it. I would just like to see the money going to individual user-content-creators, not big, professional media companies.
The purpose of the "subject" is self-explanatory. It briefly describes what the post is about, so people can skim the subject lines without reading the whole post. It is not for posting the first half of a sentence (poor netiquette).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
to state the subject of your post.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
You are correct. I've been watching TV over thirty years for free, with just an antenna. The advent of VCRs and DVDs made it easier for me to collect my favorite shows (like Star Trek), but I still prefer to see my television without a charge because, let's face it, a lot of it is trash and not worth buying.
Youtube falls into the "not worth buying" category. I'll simply boycott the site rather than handover a single dollar, and get my entertainment someplace else for free (like over-the-air television).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Re: Clearly it exists
The only real way to answer this question is to give it a try. Slapping a fee on everything could hurt the YouTube brand a lot, so it needs to be done slowly and starting at the fringes. I think they should let content providers charge subscription fees for their channels. Of course, YouTube/Google would get a cut of the revenue. Regular viewers shouldn't complain because this is new content above and beyond what is currently offered. YouTube could assess how users react and everyone could get a feel for how the price structures should be set up. My guess is that the content provides will seriously overprice their content. Content providers have pretty consistently overestimated the value of their content and what consumers will pay. We will probably end up with a model where short commercials are injected into long content. Viewers will have a choice to either watch or pay a subscription fee to skip the ads. Consumers will have the choice to 1)pay 2)watch commercials or 3)find entertainment elsewhere. Content providers tend to forget about this third option.
My simple answer is the same, but my extended answer is different: I won't then run off to some other ad-supported site and endure advertising... I'll simply stop watching such things in that medium, period. I don't go to YouTube for commercial content at all in the first place, and I'll be damned if I'll pay for the privilege of viewing the non-commercial things I do want to view, not will I tolerate "interstitial" ads for that privilege.
I'll simply do without, if it comes to that, in the same way that some people eschew television. The absence of YouTube videos does not significantly diminish my life, any more than the Web's complete absence diminished my grandparent's lives (and quite the reverse, they'd probably argue now).
A few years ago Google filed a patent for a method of making micro payments from a cell phone under the name GPay. The idea being that you would text message a number and have it automatically add $x to your cell phone bill, which would make it into the hands of whoever you just paid for a service or product.
This system has been around for a while, it's especially common here in Europe, but so far Google hasn't followed through on the implementation. Maybe that will change very soon (I was sure it would be included in the Android phone).
With a system like this in place it becomes very easy for someone to tip a person for an enjoyable YouTube video. There's been times where I would gladly have given the creator a dollar or two for his video (the John Freeman adventures for example), but there's just no easy way to do it. Give me a number to text that will automatically give the creator a dollar and I'd be all over it, and I wouldn't have a problem with Google skimming a percentage for themselves (as long as it's reasonable). The first John Freeman video has 1.7 million views, if 0.1% of those viewers like it enough to give a dollar that's $1700 for the creator, not a bad hobby, and not a bad source of revenue for Google when you expand it to the millions of videos on YouTube.
The beauty of this system is there's no need for credit cards or accounts at third party websites, just text a number and the transaction is done. Anywhere, anytime. Whether it's technically and financially feasible I don't know, but it would certainly be a step ahead of a Paypal like service.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
For the most part, I already boycott the site.
It was cool for the first 50 vids, over the course of a few months.
Now, I only very reluctantly visit the site, perhaps on a whim, but I rarely feel compelled to visit.
They should consider paying me.
cheers,
Let me say first that I don't spend much time on YouTube, so my answer would definitely be NO.
But I seem to remember back in the Stone Age BG (before Google), some guy from Yahoo was talking about micro payments for search results. Never happened. If YouTube started charging people to view vids, everyone would find another site where they could see a low res vids of monkeys throwing footballs and hitting someone in the crotch.
I mean you can't throw a dead monkey without hitting a free vid site. Charging would be like saying "Move along, nothing to see here..."
I think also, that TV ads are...habit...in some ways, left over from the 3 channels and the "have to get up to change the channel" days.
Certainly their numbers are falling due to the proliferation of channels. I mean, the TV show watched by the most simultaneous viewers in history, was the M.A.S.H final episode in 1983...It had 106 million viewers. Imagine what an ad during that show cost.
Now? American Idol has been topping the charts in the last few years with numbers under 40 million on the final episodes...Way under in most cases: their best episode ever only had 36.4 million viewers.
Ad revenue is nice, but too many people making too much content, and a widely fractured audience, make it less and less profitable.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The question is not "IF", but "HOW MUCH".
If youtube offered full-length feature films with good quality, then I'd be ready to pay a reasonable amount. Let's say about the same price I pay to rent a DVD for a 700 MB download. The DVD has a better quality, but downloading is more convenient.
It's about time the media industry learned about this thing they call a "market". It's up to the seller to set a price but it's the buyer who accepts to pay the price or not.
They want us to pay for dubious quality, with unknown content videos created by complete amateurs? What are they smoking? Thats a good way to kill it off, even better then the 'IP cops' that now monitor it.
If they cant pay for it via the offensive "commercials" that have been added, then they need to get out of the way to make room for someone else who can.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
No is too mild a word.
I have better things to do with my time ... erm ... like post on slashdot.
Seriously, never, no, nada, nein, nyet, or as we say in Soviet Kanuckistan, "No fucking way, eh!"
Not everything can be monetized - and not everything that you can extract a revenue stream from will generate a profit. "First we get the eyeballs, then we figure out how to make money from it" is dead, Jim.
$0.50 to get unlimited and permanent watching rights to a TV show episode, or $1 for a movie...$10/mo for Netflix
Haven't you ever heard of Bittorrent? For exactly $0.00 you can have all that, and the file is already on your computer without the D.R.M.
So not only do you continue to own your content, you even retain the right to revoke their license to it.
Because us grown-ups realize that this stuff isn't gonna get made for free. Thousands of actual people feed their with this money. Pretending it's alright to take the fruits of their labor and give them nothing in return is simply criminal.
As far as I can tell, nobody buys ringtones for content, they buy it for "branding" themselves. They use the ringtone to announce something about themselves to everybody they are with.
Some people are willing to pay $4 in an attempt to announce "look at me, gosh I'm hip" every time their phone rings... It is not about quality or work that went into the creation!